Jeff Cotton

Interesting idea, but there are many other things that are more adjacent to the core product that we could have invested in, chose not to.

Not to mention the sales motion is very different for that type of a product.

The company just started to sprawl very quickly and did not stay focused on its core product before it had reliable demand.

Once again, getting to $5 million in revenue in ARR is great, but you have to have a sustainable path well beyond $5 million before I think you start to expand a product.

Sales expense.

Once again, the company did not have a reliable demand generation model, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, and had grown sales expense significantly.

wildly.

So they had basically gone and hired sales executives all over the United States, primarily North America focused, but had a sales team of about 26 quarter bearing reps and were only generating about $500,000 in ARR sales bookings a quarter.

That's going to get you killed very quickly and was a big part of what was burning cash without generating a lot of revenue and cash returns.

And then no successful KPI.

So I'm mostly a big enterprise guy.

This was actually my first startup, which I very purposely wanted to go do to spend time with venture capital, put my arms around a small company organization.

I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second.

But I am a maniacal operator.

It is all about what do your demand gen metrics say, success-based models to pour more investment in behind repeatable

making sure that product is delivering and you can build revenue behind the product delivery, etc.

So a part of what we had to do with the burn, like you saw, was go eliminate expense.

How many of you have had to do any kind of a layoff here so far?

Anybody had to eliminate people?

A few hands?